tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82313335831433572182015-07-23T23:03:04.016-07:00Art Markman, PhDArt Markmannoreply@blogger.comBlogger291125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-67465486355310841952015-07-02T06:35:00.002-07:002015-07-02T06:35:16.875-07:00Why Do People Engage in Extreme Rituals? <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; 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mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">It is pledge season at fraternities and sororities all over the US.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>New initiates into these groups spend a chunk of their first semester engaging in all kinds of activities from the mundane (wearing an article of clothing to distinguish them from other members of the group) to the extreme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Occasionally, stories of hazing rituals make the news when a student is injured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Fraternities and Sororities are hardly the only groups in the world that engage in extreme rituals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Anthropologists have documented all kind of practices from a variety of cultures that can be hard to understand for outside observers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Clearly, these rituals have to serve some function.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The speculation is that the most extreme rituals create some kind of social bonding among the individuals who participate in them as well as those who observe them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A fascinating paper by Dimitris Xygalatas and several co-authors in the August, 2013 issue of <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/8/1602.full"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Psychological Science</i></a> presents a field study that provides some data to back up this proposal.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This study was done in Mauritius.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The people there have a number of cultural identities including their religious identity as Hindu and their national identity of being Mauritian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The researchers studied two rituals surrounding the Hindu festival of Thaipusam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One ritual involved a period of group singing and prayer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The second ritual was more extreme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this ritual participants were given several piercings on their body, they had to carry heavy objects, drag a cart attached to their skin with hooks, and had to climb a mountain barefoot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this second ritual, some people perform the ritual, while others observe it and walk alongside the performers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Participants were tested either right after the prayer ritual or right after the extreme ritual. All participants would ultimately participate in both rituals in some way, so the results do not reflect that different types of people do the prayer and extreme rituals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The participants were given questions about their identity to determine whether they identified more as Hindu or more as Mauritian in that moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those involved in the extreme ritual as performers rated their level of pain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those involved in the extreme ritual as observers rated the level of pain they perceived in others.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Finally, at the end of the study, participants were given an envelope with money (200 rupees, which is a lot of money for these participants).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They were allowed to keep that money, but were also given the opportunity to donate that money to the temple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The donations were made in a private room where the participants were not being observed, but the experimenters had a way to track the amount of money given by each participant.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>The people who performed the extreme ritual identified most strongly as Mauritian rather than Hindu.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those who were tested after the prayer ritual also identified as Mauritian, but much less strongly than those who performed the extreme ritual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those tested after observing the extreme ritual came out in between in their identity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The participants who engaged in the extreme ritual as performers or as observers donated significantly more money to the temple than those who were tested after the prayer ritual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The amount of money people gave following the extreme ritual was correlated with the level of pain they experienced or perceived in others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The more pain, the more that they gave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This work suggests that extreme rituals have two important influences on communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>First, they increase people’s identity with the group, particular at the time that those rituals are being performed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Second, they make people more likely to sacrifice their own personal resources for the group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants were paid a lot of money in this study, and yet those who had just performed the extreme ritual gave nearly all of it back to the temple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These benefits are an important reason why cultures keep performing painful and potentially dangerous rituals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-33541811466872072442015-06-29T06:46:00.001-07:002015-06-29T06:46:04.798-07:00Improve Your Success By Contrasting <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-priority:99; color:blue; mso-themecolor:hyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">A big problem in learning to achieve your goals is being selective in what you do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As much as you might value keeping all of your options open, at some point you have to commit time and energy into particular goals in order to attain them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A key part of being selective is figuring out which goals to pursue and which ones to leave behind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>To make that decision, there are two criteria you can use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One is to determine how important a particular goal is to you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The second is to think about how achievable that goal is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ultimately, you want to put your effort into things that are important to you that you also believe you can achieve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the past, I have written about the research of <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/200905/get-energized-about-your-future-just-compare-it-your-life-now">Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Their research suggests that an important part of the process of selecting particular goals to achieve involves comparing the present to the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These comparisons highlight what has to be done in order to help you achieve your goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When people are forced to make these kinds of comparisons (rather than focusing selectively on the present or the future), they are more likely to commit to achievable goals and to take steps to reach them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">How common is it for people to make these comparisons?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Timur Sevincer and Gabriele Oettingen explore this question in an interesting paper in the September, 2013 issue of <a href="http://psp.sagepub.com/content/39/9/1240.abstract"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</i></a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">First, they developed a scheme for analyzing what people write about their goals in order to tease out whether they were contrasting the present and the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>To do that, they asked people to write about goals that were important to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some people were asked to focus only on the present and how they were currently achieving the goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some people were asked to focus only on the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A third group was asked to contrast the present with the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Looking at this writing, they were able to tease out the statements that referred to the present and the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People’s writing did indeed show evidence of these instructions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those who were asked to compare the present to the future wrote more about both the present and the future than those asked to focus selectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This initial study demonstrated that the researchers could identify who was contrasting the present to the future just from the way people write about their goals.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In a second study, over 300 participants in an internet study were asked to write about a goal that was important to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They were given no particular instructions on whether to focus on the present or the future or both.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People were later asked to rate whether they thought the goal was achievable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Finally, a week later, people were asked a number of questions about how hard they worked that week to try to achieve the goal they wrote about.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In this study, 9% of people spontaneously contrasted the present and future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The most common types of writing focused selectively on the present (36% of people) or the future (24%).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The remaining participants talked about their goals in a different way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Interestingly, the people who spontaneously contrasted the present with the future were most selective in their goal pursuit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They were most likely to take actions to achieve their goals when they thought the goal was achievable and least likely to take actions when they thought the goal could not be achieved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The people who wrote only about the present, only about the future, or used another strategy were less selective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They put in about the same amount of effort on their goals regardless of how achievable they thought the goal to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The researchers obtained a similar result using a laboratory study in which students first wrote about their goal to get into graduate school and then wrote sample personal statements for an application.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this laboratory study, a somewhat higher percentage of people spontaneously contrasted present and future (27%).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The most common strategy in this study was to focus on the present (51%).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Only 3% of participants in this study focused selectively on the future.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What does this mean?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">First, following previous work, it is clear that if you want to focus selectively on the goals that you believe you will be able to achieve, then you have to start by contrasting the present and the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Figure out what you are doing in the present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Then, think about what you want the desired future to be and how you will feel if you achieve your goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Finally, determine what needs to be done to bring that desired future into being and elaborate on the obstacles that will get in the way of reaching your goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That strategy is the best path for success.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Second, despite the importance of this mental contrasting, it is not something that most people do spontaneously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People are much more likely to focus selectively on what they are currently doing now or what they should be doing in the future rather than on comparing the present to the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Next time you are thinking about goal achievement, make an effort to contrast the present and the future to improve your chances of success.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-17862190458220369482015-06-24T06:10:00.003-07:002015-06-24T06:10:38.034-07:00Goal Conflict Helps You See Both Sides of an Issue <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; 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mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">One of the most persistent findings in psychology is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">confirmation bias</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When we have a belief about something in the world, we tend to seek out information that will confirm that belief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, if you meet a new person, and you believe that they are an extravert, you might focus on finding out information consistent with that belief (like whether they enjoy attending big parties and meeting new people) rather than information inconsistent with that belief (like whether they enjoy time alone or like to stick with the same close circle of friends).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">An interesting paper by Tali Kleiman and Ran Hassin in the September, 2013 issue of the <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/105/3/374/" target="_blank"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology</i></a> suggests that people might be more prone to consider two sides of an issue when they are experiencing a goal conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Goals drive our behavior. One thing that makes it difficult to achieve our goals, though, is that sometimes they conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, a student might want to study in order to get a good grade on an upcoming exam, but might also want to go out with friends to have a good time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When it is not possible to do both, the goals are in conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Kleiman and Hassin suggest that when goals conflict, it puts people in a mindset that forces them to consider two sides of issues, because resolving the goal conflict requires that people consider the strengths and weaknesses of the opportunities before them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Interestingly, goals can conflict even when people are not consciously aware of the conflict. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To test this possibility, participants were brought to the lab to do what they were told were two unrelated studies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>First, they did a lexical decision task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this task, they see strings of letter and have to respond whether they form a word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If they saw the letters BROGI, they would respond that it was not a word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If they saw the letters PARTY, they would respond that it was a word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One group saw words that referred to both an academic goal (like CLASS and STUDY) and a social goal (like PARTY and MOVIE).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This condition created an unconscious goal conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A second group saw words that were not consistently related to any goals.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After doing this lexical decision task, participants were told that they could ask a series of questions to someone to find out whether he was an extravert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They were given a list of 25 possible questions and were asked to pick 12. Ten of the questions would ask for information that would confirm that the person was an extravert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ten of the questions would ask for information that would suggest the person was an introvert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The remaining questions were unrelated to extraversion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">People in the control condition chose far more questions relating to extraversion than introversion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The people who were given the goal conflict asked about the same number of extraversion and introversion questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This result suggests that people primed with a goal conflict were not influenced by confirmation bias as strongly as those given no goal conflict.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A second study primed people with words that were opposites rather than just goal conflict, and found that opposites still lead to a confirmation bias.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A third study found that when people were primed with two unrelated goals that do not conflict directly, they still exhibit confirmation bias.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Each of these studies also replicated the finding that goal conflict reduces confirmation bias.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Putting these results together, the motivational system influences both actions and thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Clearly, having an active goal pushes you to act in ways that are consistent with the goal. An active goal also pushes people to think about information that is related to that goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But, when goals compete, it pushes people to think in ways that will help them to resolve conflicts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Reducing confirmation bias is one way to help resolve those conflicts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-80215116638644833162015-06-09T06:17:00.003-07:002015-06-09T06:17:19.353-07:00You See What You Believe <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-priority:99; color:blue; mso-themecolor:hyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">The world can be chaotic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Cars whiz by on the road. People walk past you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There may be birds and planes flying overhead. Despite all of this potential confusion, you manage to make sense of most of what is happening around you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The ability to comprehend the world reflects an interaction between the things you see around you and your beliefs about the world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">An interesting question is the degree to which your beliefs influence what you are seeing in the moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This question was explored by Christos Bechlivanidis and David Lagnado in a fascinating paper in the August, 2013 issue of <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/8/1563.abstract"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Psychological Science</i></a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">They created a simple computer-based environment in which basic shapes (like squares and rectangles) could move and influence each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>By playing with the environment for a while, participants could learn how the various objects worked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, when a green square collided with a barrier, it caused the red rectangle to become a star.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The blue square would only allow squares, but not other shapes to enter its borders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, in order to get the red rectangle inside the blue square, the green square had to collide with the barrier first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In one study, some participants were given a series of exercises in this computer environment so that they learned how the objects acted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Eventually, they learned how to get the red rectangle inside the blue square.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A second group got no training.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Afterward, participants saw a video of the objects moving in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this video, the red rectangle entered the blue square about 100 milliseconds before the green square hit the platform.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The red rectangle turned into a star after the green square hit the platform.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>All of this happened in the same spatial position, so that participants could see all of the objects without having to move their eyes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The participants then described the order of events in the test video and gave information about why the events happened in that order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those who received no training generally saw the events happen in the order in which they happened in the video.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They recognized that the red rectangle turned into a square before the green square hit the platform and that the rectangle became a star after it entered the blue square.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When asked, they said that this was the order they saw the events.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The participants who received training were much more prone to describe the events in the order that fit with their training.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They reported that the green square hit the platform before the rectangle turned into a star, and that the rectangle turned into a star before it entered the blue square.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They were also likely to say that this ordering happened, because that reflects the way the environment works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">At one level, it should not be surprising that we have to use a lot of conceptual knowledge to help us make sense of what happens in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Causal relationships do not often change that quickly, and so it is valuable (most of the time) for our beliefs to influence our interpretation of what we see.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">However, this influence of belief on behavior can be a problem in situations like eyewitness testimony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It is well known that the reports of eyewitnesses are not that reliable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If people perceive events in a way that is consistent with how they believe that the world works, then their reports of the order of events in a complex situation may be wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Because groups of people are likely to share causal beliefs, even entire groups may see events in the wrong order, so having multiple witnesses who provide corroborating testimony about the order of events does not necessarily mean that the events happened in that order.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-81678207540606099372015-06-04T09:43:00.001-07:002015-06-04T09:43:32.194-07:00Anxiety and Moral Judgment <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-priority:99; color:blue; mso-themecolor:hyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">A fascinating aspect of humanity is that we hold ourselves to a high moral standard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We impose rules on ourselves to protect society from the short-term temptations that might cause us to do things that would have a negative impact in the long-run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, we might be tempted to harm a person who bothers us, but a society in which everyone gave in to the temptation to hurt those who made us angry would quickly devolve into chaos.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">When we make these moral judgments, to what extent are people driven by their ability to reason about the consequences of their actions, or are they influenced by their emotions?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>For the past 25 years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the role that emotions play in complex judgments like moral decisions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, Antonio Damasio reviews evidence for the role of emotion in cognitive processing in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X/"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Descartes’ Error</i></a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">Once we accept that emotion plays some role in complex decisions, it is important to figure out which emotions are influencing different kinds of choices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This issue was explored in an interesting paper by Adam Perkins and several colleagues in the August, 2013 issue of the <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/142/3/612/"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal of Experimental Psychology: General</i></a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">These researchers were interested in moral decision making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In particular, many psychologists have looked at how participants respond in vignettes in which their actions could potentially cause harm to others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Quite a bit of research demonstrates that people don’t like to cause harm to others, but that they are particularly averse to causing harm when they have to perform an action that causes direct harm to a person.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">For example, imagine a situation in which you are working in a hospital as a late-night guard. An accident happens next door, and deadly fumes are released that get into the hospital’s ventilation system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These fumes will kill three patients, but if you flip a switch, you can redirect the fumes to another area of the hospital that will kill only one patient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In cases like this, although there is clearly a dilemma, people often elect to flip the switch.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">As a second example, imagine that you are taking a cruise, when the ship catches fire and you have to get on a lifeboat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>All of the lifeboats have too many people on them, and are in danger of sinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In your boat, there is an injured person who is going to die before you are rescued. If you throw that person overboard, the boat will not sink and everyone else will be saved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this situation, people are reluctant to throw the person overboard, because this action would directly cause the death of the person.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">The researchers suggest that the emotion of anxiety is a key factor that keeps people from stating that they would be willing to cause someone’s death directly in these vignettes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>To test this possibility, participants were given vignettes like these as well as control stories in which people had to make decisions with no moral dimension like which of two raffle tickets to buy based on the prize available.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">To test the role of anxiety in these decisions, 40 participants were run in three sessions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In two of those sessions, participants were given a low or a moderate dose of the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the other session, participants received a placebo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">The drug had no reliable effect on people’s decisions for choices that had no moral element or for people’s choices when their actions would cause a person’s death indirectly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>However, participants were most likely to elect to directly cause a person’s death in these dilemmas on the highest dose of lorazepam, least likely to cause the death in the placebo condition with the low dose condition in-between.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">These results have to be taken with some caution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The effects are rather small.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants made decisions in six decisions of each type in each session.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the placebo condition, participants chose to kill a person directly in 1.75 of these dilemmas on average.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That rate rose to 2.33 dilemmas on average for the highest dose of the drug.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, the drug did have a reliable influence on performance, but not a huge influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">In addition, these studies involve only vignettes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It is hard to know exactly how people’s responses to stories relate to what they would actually do in a real situation.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>However, the study does help to isolate the set of emotions that influence moral decisions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Anti-anxiety drugs like lorazepam influence anxiety and people’s response to threat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They do not have a broad-based effect on emotion overall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, this research does push forward our understanding of the role of emotion in complex decisions.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-221627100657234862015-05-26T06:19:00.001-07:002015-05-26T06:19:10.508-07:00Psychology Commencement Address 2015 at the University of Texas <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I had the honor of giving the commencement address to the Psychology students at the University of Texas in 2015.&nbsp; Here are my remarks.</span><br /><br /> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; 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margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Graduates, family and friends, faculty, Dean Flores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I am honored to be speaking at today’s commencement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Before I get started, I want you to take a second to drink this moment in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the rush of events this weekend, you run the risk of having your memory for the graduation feel like a blur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, just enjoy this feeling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Feel the pride of your family and friends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Bask in the glow of your accomplishment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Today, you are graduates in Psychology at the University of Texas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>At this time of transition, you are leaving the familiarity of the routine of the university for the uncertainty of the next phase of your life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You might be worried about how your work here has prepared you to join the broader world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You may not realize it, but as a result of your education, you are uniquely qualified to make the world around you a better place for two reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>First, you now have more insight into the human condition than most people, who live in blissful ignorance of the reasons why they act the way they do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Second, you are now a trained scientist who can ask and answer questions with data.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">For the next few minutes, I want to focus on three questions you can use as a guide no matter where your life takes you from UT.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These questions are the ones that will help you to improve the lives of the people around you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The first question is “Why?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Why?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Because understanding the way the world works is a crucial part of solving new problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Without knowing why the world works as it does, all you can do is to carry out procedures and hope they succeed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Chances are, when you have a problem with your computer, you just restart it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You do that hoping it will fix the problem so that you don’t have to call tech support or stand on line at the Genius Bar and talk to someone who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does </i>know how your computer works&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">As it turns out, most people understand the way the world works far less well than they believe they do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That is, they suffer from an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">illusion of explanatory depth</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This illusion is a problem, because you can’t solve new problems in new ways unless you understand the way things work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And you won’t bother learning the way things work if you think you already know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, an important ingredient for success is knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The question “Why?” is the cure to the illusion of explanatory depth. By constantly asking that question of yourself and others, you ensure that you maximize the quality of the knowledge you have so that it will be there when you need it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You have spent your time at UT honing your skill to ask and answer the question “why?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Now, you need to keep doing it after you leave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As an added bonus, by asking “why” of the people around you, you also help to cure <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their</i>illusions of explanatory depth.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The second question is “What would I have done in that situation?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Another important thing you have learned as psychology students is that the actions people perform involve a complex interaction between who they are and the situation they find themselves in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">When you see somebody do something that you think is a mistake (or flat out wrong), it is tempting to conclude that there is something wrong with their personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Personality reflects the factory settings of people’s motivational system—the brain mechanisms that drive people to act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We all have a tendency to act in a particular way, and that reflects those factory settings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, I like to be on stage in front of people giving talks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Other people find even the thought of giving a speech enough to make them ill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In part, that reflects personality differences.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Often, though, the situations that people are in are a much bigger influence on what they do than their personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Before you conclude that someone’s mistake reflects some problem with who they are, ask yourself what you would have done in the same situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As you begin to think carefully about how you would navigate the circumstances of someone else’s life, it can give you a greater appreciation for the outside factors driving their behavior.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">This matters, because if you think there is truly something wrong with another person, it undermines your trust in them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For a social species like ours, trust is critical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>However, if there aspects of a situation that you believe are affecting people’s behavior, then you may not lose trust in them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Instead, you can work with them to help them deal better with that situation in the future or to make sure that situation never happens again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The third crucial question is, “What’s the evidence?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As a psychology student, you have learned that people will go to great lengths to preserve their existing opinions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People interpret the world in a way that is consistent with what they already believe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Through confirmation bias, they seek new information that would provide further support for their current opinions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And, in the modern era in which there are hundreds of channels and thousand of websites, they can curate their life experience to ensure that they rarely encounter opinions that differ from their own.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">But, you were trained as a scientist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Science is one of humanity’s great inventions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It is a system for helping us to change our opinions by looking for the evidence that would support both what we currently believe to be true and—more importantly—what we currently <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don’t</i> believe to be true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>At the point where the weight of evidence argues against our pet theories, we have to give them up in favor of something more consistent with the data.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">As an example, let’s look at biology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>After Watson and Crick published their work on the structure of DNA, the next great biological quest was to crack the genetic code.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The sequences of base pairs in DNA code for amino acids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Watson and Crick figured out that sequences of three base pairs were the basic unit of genes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The next problem was to determine how the various combinations of base pairs coded for particular amino acids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Francis Crick was part of a team that also involved mathematicians and cryptographers that came up with an elegant mathematical solution to the problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One commentator later called their solution “the prettiest wrong idea of the 20<sup>th</sup> century.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In fact, scientists cracked the genetic code by brute force—synthesizing the amino acids from the base pairs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And the actual answer was not mathematically elegant, though it was chemically stable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The wonder of science is that no matter how elegant and beautiful an argument may be, if it runs counter to the data, you have to reject it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the modern world, we face a lot of problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some of them—like climate change—involve science that may fall outside your area of expertise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Others—like the value of high-stakes testing in public education—may hit closer to your training.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Whenever you encounter a question in which data would help to provide a good answer, you should look for that data.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ask for evidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ideology and oratory are persuasive, but there is nothing better than good data for most of the thorny problems in life.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Of course, you should also use data only when you’re addressing questions that ought to be answered scientifically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There is no amount of scientific data that matters when you decide that a particular musical piece is magnificent or that a sunset you are watching is stunning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The degree you receive today from the University of Texas demonstrates that you have learned a process for making the world a better place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Whether you choose a profession that ties directly to your studies here or not, the insight you have about people combined with your knowledge of scientific method have given you an excellent basis to ask crucial questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Wherever you go, and whatever you do, keep asking “Why?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the most frustrating times, ask “What would I have done in that situation?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And give yourself a chance to test your assumptions by asking “What is the evidence?”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">As you cross the stage today, remember that you are walking into a future in which you will use the skills you learned here every day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Find <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">your</i> way to make the world a better place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And—every once in a while—reach back out to us here at UT and let us know how you’re doing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Congratulations graduates, and enjoy this glorious day.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-66339796752733941562015-05-20T06:23:00.002-07:002015-05-20T06:23:36.243-07:00Does rejection make you creative? <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; 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mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">When you watch movies about high school, certain stereotypes repeat. The football players hang around in packs wearing their letter jackets with cheerleaders hanging off their arms. The science nerds sit quietly in the cafeteria eating lunch hoping nobody notices them. And the artists sit by themselves—at a distance from all of this social interaction—watching the world go by.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This scene reinforces a stereotype that there is a relationship between creativity and being rejected by society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Of course, even if this relationship exists, it is hard to know the direction it goes. It is possible that people who are truly creative are rejected by others, because their ideas go against the norm. It is also possible tat something about social rejection fuels creativity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This issue was explored in an interesting paper by Sharon Kim, Lynne Vincent, and Jack Goncalo in the August, 2013 issue of the <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/142/3/605/"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal of Experimental Psychology: General</i></a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They suggest that social rejection can make some people more creative.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In particular, people differ in how strongly they prize independence. Some people really want to see themselves as unique and different from everyone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Other people get a lot of their energy from being part of a group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The more independent people are, the more that social rejection can actually make them more creative.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In one study, the authors measured people’s need to feel unique using a questionnaire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Then, participants were brought to the lab with five other people and were told that some would be selected for a group exercise, while others would work alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They filled out a description of themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some people were told that they were rejected from the group and would perform tasks alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Other people were told that they were accepted into the group and would join the group right after doing some tasks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In this first study, participants then did the remote associates test (RAT), which has been used as a measure of creativity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the RAT, people see three words (like SALT DEEP and FOAM) and they have to select a word that goes with all three of these words (in this case, SEA).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Doing well on this test requires people to think divergently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The authors found an interaction between social rejection and people’s need to feel unique.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For people with a low need to feel unique, rejection had no influence on their scores on the remote associates test.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For people with a high need to feel unique, though, they got more correct answers on the RAT following rejection than following acceptance into a group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In a second study, the researchers manipulated people’s need to feel unique using a procedure that has been employed in other studies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants read a passage and were asked to circle the pronouns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For some people, the pronouns were first-person singular (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For other people the pronouns were first-person plural (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i>). Participants who circle singular pronouns are more focused on being independent than those who circle plural pronouns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>After that, the rejection manipulation and RAT were done as before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The people primed to be independent who were rejected scored best on the RAT of all the groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Once again, being independent and being socially rejected led to creativity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A third study repeated the one I just described with the manipulations of independence and rejection, but used a different measure of creativity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This group was asked to draw alien creatures from a planet not like Earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This task has been used by Tom Ward and his colleagues in the past as a measure of creativity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The drawings were then judged for their creativity. The group that was primed for independence and was socially rejected also made the most creative drawings.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What is going on here?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When people are part of a group or want to be part of a group, then there is social pressure for people’s ideas to conform to those of the people around them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This conformity makes people less creative, because it decreases the value they put on divergent thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When people are motivated to be independent, though, then having unique ideas further reinforces that independence. The combination of a mindset to be independent and some social rejection is one way to spur this mindset.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-22141720233341430572015-05-15T06:25:00.001-07:002015-05-15T06:25:00.704-07:00Personality and weight gain <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">There is a tendency to look at people who have put on weight and assume that there is something about their personality that made them gain weight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We rarely contemplate the opposite possibility, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Perhaps behaviors that lead people to gain weight actually lead to changes in people’s personality over time.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This possibility was explored in a fascinating paper by Angelina Suttin and seven co-authors in the July, 2013 issue of <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/7/1323.abstract"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Psychological Science</i>.</a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These authors examined data from about 2000 people taken from two longitudinal studies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The adults in these studies were generally in their 40s and 50s at the time of the first measurement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The individuals in these studies took a basic personality inventory and also had their height and weight measured (in one study) or they self-reported their weight (in the other).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The measurements for each individual were taken 8-10 years apart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The researchers analyzed the data to see whether significant weight gain (a gain of more than 10 pounds) and significant weight loss (a loss of more than 10 pounds) influenced measures of personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Weight loss had no reliable effect on the measures of personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>However, weight gain had two relationships to personality.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Participants who gained more than 10 pounds were just as impulsive as those who did not at the baseline measure, but were significantly more impulsive in the follow-up test than those who did not gain weight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Surprisingly, those who gained weight also increased in how likely they were to deliberate about decisions compared to those who did not gain weight.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This pair of findings is interesting for a number of reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>First, it suggests that repeated behaviors that lead to bodily changes can ultimately influence personality characteristics as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Giving in and eating too much repeatedly over a 10-year period can lead people to become more impulsive overall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Second, the combination of results for impulsiveness and deliberation is interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You might think that people who are impulsive do not think about their actions and the consequences of their actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this case, though, people are both more impulsive and more deliberative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That means that they likely understand the consequences of their impulsiveness, but they cannot stop themselves from acting.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">These data suggest that it might be useful to take a different approach to weight loss, particularly with older adults.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Often, we provide a lot of information about healthy eating and weight loss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The assumption is that if more people understood why their eating habits are leading to weight gain and potential bad health, they would change the way they eat.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">These data suggest that information alone is unlikely to help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The people in this study are able to think about their actions, they simply don’t change their behavior in the face of temptation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That suggests that we need to help people to change their environment to make the behaviors they want to perform easier to do and the behaviors they want to avoid harder to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In addition, it suggests that people need to engage with family and friends to save them from temptation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ultimately, when you are likely to be impulsive, the people around you can be a great source of strength.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-40641095600860891312015-05-08T06:01:00.003-07:002015-05-08T06:01:32.077-07:00You Use Body Information to Recognize People, But You Don’t Know You’re Doing It. <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">Standing at the airport waiting for a friend or relative to emerge from a flight can be a frustrating experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People come pouring out of the exit, and you are searching for one person in particular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>On a crowded day, you might not even be able to get that close to the exit, and so it can be hard to see the person you are looking for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Yet, most of the time, you manage to find the person you seek.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Part of what helps you to identify friends and relatives is information about their body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You recognize their height, body shape, and even their manner of walking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In fact, all of that may help you to know who you are looking at before the person is close enough to really see his or her face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">An interesting paper in the November, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Psychological Science</i> by Allyson Rice, Jonathon Phillips, Vaidehi Natu, Xiaobo An, and Alice O’Toole demonstrates that people use information about the body to identify people, but they are not aware that they are doing so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">In these studies, participants saw pairs of pictures drawn from a large database.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants had to identify whether the pair of pictures showed the same person or different people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The pictures used in the study were carefully selected so that this task was quite difficult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Many of the pictures of the same person were rather dissimilar, while many of the pictures of different people were similar to each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As a result, face information alone was not helpful in determining whether the people in each pair were similar.</div><div class="MsoNormal">When participants were given the full pictures, they were reasonably accurate in making the judgments of which pictures were the same or different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some participants were shown only the faces from the pictures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This group was not good at all at distinguishing the same and different pairs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A third group saw only the bodies with the faces covered by an oval.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This group was about as accurate at identifying the pictures as the group who saw the full pictures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">So far, this probably doesn’t seem so surprising.</div><div class="MsoNormal">In another study, participants were given the full pictures to judge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Afterward, they were asked about a variety of facial and bodily features, and were asked how much they used this information to make the judgments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants performed well in this study, suggesting that they had to be using information about the body, but their ratings suggested they believed that they were focused on the nose, face shape, ears, mouth, eye shape and eyebrows, but not on properties like the hair length, height, shoulders, and neck.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">These ratings suggest that people are mistaken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That is, when people see just the face information, they are not able to distinguish between the pictures of the same people and pictures of different people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The body shape information is important, yet people do not report using it.</div><div class="MsoNormal">A final study demonstrated that people really were reporting the information they used to make judgments incorrectly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this study, participants saw full pictures. They viewed the picture pairs while their eyes were being tracked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Eye tracking enables researchers to monitor what people are looking at on a moment-by-moment basis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The technique is effective, because you clear vision for only a small area (about the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, your eyes are constantly in motion to create a clear image of what you are seeing.</div><div class="MsoNormal">In this eye tracking study, some of the pairs of pictures were ones in which face information could be used to make reasonably accurate judgments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Other pairs required body information to be used.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When the face information was helpful for making judgments, people looked at it quite a bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When the face information was not helpful for making judgments, then people focused more on areas of the body that would help them to determine whether the two people were the same.</div><div class="MsoNormal">What does this mean?</div><div class="MsoNormal">First of all, your visual system is smart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It does a good job of figuring out the information you need to make judgments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">Second, you do not have complete access to all of what your visual system is doing. Even though you shift your attention from the face to the body when body information will help you to recognize a person, you still think that you are focused on the person’s face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This is another great example of how your conscious experience of what you are doing is not an accurate portrayal of what you are actually doing.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-56800635034194443652015-04-30T07:49:00.002-07:002015-04-30T07:49:18.618-07:00Can Video Games Make You Smart (Or At Least More Flexible)? <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">The potential ills of video game play have been broadcast all over the media.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Playing violent video games can <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201105/video-games-violence-and-dehumanization">prime aggressive behavior</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Kids who get video game systems perform <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201004/video-games-make-lousy-gift">worse in school</a> after they get the system than they did before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Not all effects of video games are bad, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201001/the-positive-effect-action-video-games-speed-visual-processing">There is evidence</a> that playing video games can make people faster at processing visual information like searching for an object among a set of other distracters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One hallmark of smart thinking is flexibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People who are able to see the same object in different ways and can keep lots of possibilities in mind at the same time are often able to develop novel and creative solutions to problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A paper by Brian Glass, Todd Maddox, and Brad Love in the August 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070350">PLoS One</a></i> suggests that some kinds of video games can help to teach this skill.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">They compared the effects of playing real-time strategy games to playing games that require no particular strategic thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The participants in this study were all women, because the experimenters had trouble finding enough men who do not play video games regularly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The women were assigned to one of three groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One group played a simple version of the game StarCraft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this game, participants have to create, organize, and deploy armies to attack an enemy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the simple version of the game, the player had one base and the enemy had one base.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the more complex version of the game, the player had two bases and the enemy had two bases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The overall difficulty of the game was then set up so that the simple and complex versions of the game were about equally hard to win.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This way, the games differed primarily in how much information players needed to keep in mind while playing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The control condition had people play a life simulation (the SIMS), which does not require much strategy or memory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants played their assigned game for 40 hours.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As a test, participants were given a pre-test and post-test of a series of tasks that tap cognitive abilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some of the tests require cognitive flexibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, in the classic Stroop task, people name the color of a font for words that name colors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The typical finding is that people are slow to name the color when the word names a different color than the font.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In task switching procedures, people flip back and forth between the responses they make.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, in one task, people are shown a letter and a number (say e4).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>On some trials, they are prompted to identify whether the letter is a vowel or consonant, while on other trials, they are prompted to identify whether the number is odd or even.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People generally slow down when asked to switch from one task (say identifying letters) on one trial to the other task (identifying numbers) on the next. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>The faster you are able to switch between tasks, though, the more flexibly you are thinking.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Other tasks did not require flexibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, a visual search task requires finding a particular object among a set of distracters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That task requires perceptual speed, but not flexibility.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The results of the study were striking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants who played StarCraft showed significant improvement on the cognitive flexibility tasks, but not the other tasks compared to those who played the SIMS.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The improvement was largest for those who played the complex version of the game, and smaller for those who played the simple version.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Additional analyses found that the people who played the complex version of the game had to keep more information in mind while playing than those who played the simple version.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Practice using all of this information may have been the root of the improvement on the flexibility tasks.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">These results are intriguing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It is hard to get people to work on difficult tasks for long in school settings, but much easier to get them to work for long hours while playing video games.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If games can be structured to promote skills that improve flexible thinking, then they can be a valuable tool in helping people to get smarter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">That said, flexible thinking is only a part of being smarter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In order to really do smart things, you also need to know a lot of information in order to be able to use that knowledge to solve problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As much fun as video games may be, they will not substitute for the hours you need to put in to become an expert in at least one domain.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-63614872295361646492015-04-16T08:36:00.001-07:002015-04-16T08:36:25.215-07:00Having a Hot Hand Increases Confidence, But Not Success <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">One of the great things about doing research is that you can actually test the beliefs that people take for granted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And sometimes, those beliefs are shown to be false.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A classic example of this approach comes in the belief in a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hot hand</i> in basketball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When you watch a basketball game, a player will make a couple of shots, and the announcers will decide that player is “on fire” and that he ought to take the team’s next shot.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Back in 1985, though, <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010028585900106">Tom Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky</a> actually analyzed data from the Philadelphia 76ers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They found no evidence for a hot hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The hot hand would say that if a player makes one shot, then they should be more likely to make a second.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky found that the probability that a player would make a second shot was independent of whether they made the first one, suggesting that there is no hot hand.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">An interesting question, though, is whether the belief in the hot hand influences the behavior of the players themselves. That question was explored in analyses by Yigal Attali reported in the July, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/7/1151.abstract">Psychological Science</a></i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>He analyzed all of the data from every game in the 2010-2011 National Basketball Association season.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Modern transcripts for games include lots of information including who took each shot, whether it was made, and the distance of the shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Attali found evidence that the belief in a hot hand did affect the behavior of players.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When a player made one shot, it affected whether they would take the team’s next shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When the shot was from a short distance (a dunk or layup), then players took about 20% of their team’s next shots regardless of whether they made or missed the shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>However, when they made a shot that was longer than 4 feet, they were much more likely to take the team’s next shot than if they missed that shot.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">That’s not all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When players made a shot, the next shot they took was generally further from the basket than when players missed their last shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Because longer shots probably reflect that a player has more confidence in his ability, this suggests that making a shot increases a player’s confidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Paradoxically, though, this confidence has a cost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Longer shots are more likely to be missed than shorter shots, so when a player takes two shots in a row, he is much more likely to miss the second shot than to make it, because the second shot is probably taken from further away following a hit than following a miss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>(Indeed, Attali re-analyzed the data from the Philadelphia 76ers that Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky used, and found a similar effect that when a player makes one shot, they are actually less likely to make the second shot than when they missed the previous shot.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Finally, Attali explored the effect of making a shot on the behavior of coaches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>He found that players were much less likely to be taken out of a game following a made shot than following a missed shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, coaches are also acting as though they believe in a hot hand.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What does all of this mean?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In lots of domains (including basketball), we have theories about the way the world works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those theories influence our actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>However, it is important to know whether our theories about the way the world works are actually true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Sometimes, as in the case of the hot hand in basketball, not only is the theory false, but acting based on the theory also makes people’s performance worse than it would be if they did not believe in the theory.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-6565994193656313192015-04-07T05:52:00.000-07:002015-04-07T05:52:15.220-07:00Rituals Make the World Taste Better <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; 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text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">In the United States, we have a strange relationship with food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Most of us eat on the go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We drive through at fast food restaurants and then stuff our faces as we get where we’re going.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We eat at our desks while working.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We grab dinner in between other tasks, sometimes standing at a counter in the kitchen.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Food is fuel, of course, so perhaps this approach makes sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We don’t make an elaborate ceremony of putting gas in the car, so why should mealtime be any different?</div><div class="MsoNormal">Yet, cultures have often created rituals around food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In many countries, mealtime is an oasis from the troubles of the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Everyone sits down around a well-set table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Dishes are placed in the center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People may say a prayer before eating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And then the meal and the conversation commences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">What exactly do we get out of creating ceremonies around eating?</div><div class="MsoNormal">An interesting paper by Kathleen Vohs, Yajin Wang, Francesca Gino, and Michael Norton in the September, 2013 issue of <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/9/1714.abstract"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Psychological Science</i></a> examines whether rituals affect the taste of food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">In one study, participants ate carrots three times over the course of an experimental session.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Carrots are an interesting food choice, because they taste good, but they are not high on most people’s lists of desirable foods (compared, say, to ice cream or chocolate).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One group was given a ritual to perform before eating each carrot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They would bang their knuckles on the table, close their eyes, and take a deep breath.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A second group was given a different sequence of actions before each carrot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, they performed an action, but it was not a ritual, because the actions were always different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">Before eating the last carrot, participants rated how much they thought they would enjoy it, and after eating it, they rated their enjoyment of the carrot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Finally, some participants were able to eat the third carrot immediately after performing the ritual, but others had a delay before eating the carrot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The participants with the delay performed an unrelated study before eating the carrot.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Overall, participants who performed the ritual anticipated enjoying the carrot more than those who performed random actions, and their ratings of actual enjoyment were also higher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The delay actually enhanced the influence of the ritual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When people knew there would be a delay, they believed they would enjoy the carrot more and they actually did enjoy it more.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Another study (this one involving lemonade) found that you have to perform the ritual yourself to get the benefit of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants who watched the experimenter perform the ritual enjoyed the lemonade less than those who performed the ritual themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal">One last study (this one involving chocolate) found that participants who performed a ritual were more interested in the food than those who did not perform a ritual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, the ritual seems to have affected people’s intrinsic interest in the activity of eating.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Rituals are a pervasive cultural invention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Every culture asks people to perform actions that have no obvious value in and of themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I have written before about studies demonstrating that <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201309/why-do-people-engage-in-extreme-rituals">rituals can increase people’s sense of closeness</a> to a community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These studies expand this influence to show that rituals can increase people’s sense of closeness to food as well.</div><div class="MsoNormal">If you find that you are not enjoying the food you eat and that you tend to treat your food as fuel, then consider creating some rituals around the way you eat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Set your table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Turn off the TV and the computer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Close your eyes for a moment and prepare to eat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And then…enjoy.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-44301782022450391872015-03-30T06:24:00.001-07:002015-03-30T06:24:40.777-07:00Self-Compassion and Health <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">A few times in this blog, I have written about self-compassion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Self-compassion is the degree to which you treat yourself with kindness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It differs from related concepts like self-esteem, which is how good you feel about yourself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Self-compassion determines how well you come back from adversity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If you get down on yourself when things go wrong, then it is hard to bounce back from a problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If you treat yourself with kindness, then it is easier to recover from a bad experience.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">An interesting paper in the July, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://psp.sagepub.com/content/39/7/911.abstract">Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</a></i> by Meredith Terry, Mark Leary, Sneha Mehta, and Kelly Henderson examined the relationship between self-compassion and health behaviors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A key question in health-care is what factors lead people to seek help for medical problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Every year, some number of people avoid going to the doctor, even when they think they might be sick.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This avoidance can be dangerous if the delay leads a treatable condition to get worse.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In a series of studies, the authors examined the relationship between a measure of self-compassion and a variety of health-related behaviors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>To measure self-compassion, the authors used a scale that described a series of bad things that could happen in someone’s life like making a stupid mistake or having a hard time doing something that other people find easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They asked people to evaluate whether they would be likely to do self-compassionate things like cheering themselves up or uncompassionate things like judging themselves harshly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One study found that people with health problems who have a high level of self-compassion are less depressed about those problems than people with a low level of self-compassion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Another study found that people with a high-level of self-compassion said they would see a doctor more quickly for health problems than people with a low-level of self-compassion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The authors found this relationship even after controlling for factors like how good people are at planning for the future.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A final study looked at why self-compassion influences health-related behaviors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This study found that people with a high level of self-compassion also treat themselves kindly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That is, they do not get down on themselves for having an illness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They also frequently remind themselves that many people have health problems and that they do not deserve to be sick.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The combination of self-kindness and positive self-talk help to explain the influence of self-compassion on health behaviors.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This study adds to a growing body of work demonstrating the powerful effects of self-compassion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Everyone is going to experience negative events in their lives. People try a new venture and fail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They get sick or injured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They get in relationships that ultimately break up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They have loved-ones who get sick or die.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Nobody can escape the bad things that happen in life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The key is to find ways to deal with those negative events in a positive way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It is fine to experience the pain of a negative event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But, after acknowledging the pain, it is also important to get up and try again—to remember that failures and illnesses and bad relationships are not a verdict on your worth as a person, but just another hurdle to be overcome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ultimately, you need to learn to treat yourself with the same kindness you would show to others in the same situation.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-4896509300114074422015-03-18T05:57:00.002-07:002015-03-18T05:57:16.516-07:00Self-control and success <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">Most of us believe that a certain amount of self-control is crucial for success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In order to succeed in the modern world, you need expertise in some area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Gaining that expertise requires work and practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The discipline to work or practice at something means that you have to give up things that might be fun right now in order to engage in actions that will be rewarding in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Research by Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and their colleagues supports this link.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They looked at the relationship between the delay of gratification task developed by Walter Mischel in the 1960s and later performance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the delay of gratification task, young kids (often preschoolers) are put in a room where they are seated in front of a desirable food (like a marshmallow or cookie).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They are told that the experimenter is going to leave the room for a while and that if they have not eaten the treat while the experimenter is gone, they will get two treats instead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The experimenter then leaves the room for a period of time (often about 10 minutes) and then returns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The amount of time that a child is willing to wait in order to get the extra treat is a measure of self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Mischel, Shoda, and their colleagues find that the amount of time that children will wait as preschoolers is related to many positive outcomes in adolescence such as higher grades, greater social competence, and a better ability to deal with stress.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What is going on with this delay of gratification task?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On its face, it clearly measures some kind of self-control ability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>However, it may also measure other factors like intelligence that could ultimately lead to differences years later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>An interesting paper by Angela Duckworth, Eli Tsukayama, and Teri Kirby in the July, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://psp.sagepub.com/content/39/7/843.abstract">Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</a></i> explored the delay of gratification task in more detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">They examined the data from 966 children who were given the delay of gratification test as preschoolers as part of a longitudinal study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In addition to this test, there was information from parents and caregivers about ability to focus attention, impulsivity, temperament, and intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In 9<sup>th</sup> grade, these same students were assessed for their grade-point average, achievement test scores, their body mass index, and their tendency to engage in risky behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A variety of other demographic characteristics were also measured including parental education level, SES, gender, and race/ethnicity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In this study, performance on the delay of gratification task was related to both parent/caregiver ratings of self-control as well as measures of intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A statistical analysis was then used to look at how these measurements in preschool related to outcomes in ninth grade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The delay of gratification task did not predict anything on its own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Instead, higher self-control at age 4 predicts higher standardized test scores, higher GPA and lower body mass index in ninth grade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Higher intelligence at age 4 strongly predicts higher standardized test scores in ninth grade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There is a weak relationship in which higher intelligence at age 4 also predicts slightly higher body mass index in ninth grade.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What does all of this mean?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Grade-point average in school is a better predictor of future success than just standardized test scores, because GPA reflects a combination of overall ability level and willingness to work hard in school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Self-control is related to people’s ability to work hard to achieve their long-term goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This self-control is also reflected in a lower body mass index, suggesting that people with a high level of self-control at a young age do more things to take care of themselves as they get older.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If you were lucky enough to be born with a high level of self-control as a child, then that bodes well for you in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But, what if you are a “one-marshmallow” person, prone to give into short-term temptations?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In that case, you have to find ways to protect yourself from yourself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One important thing you can do is to remove temptations from your environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You cannot give in to playing video games rather than studying if you don’t have any video games in the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You cannot eat too many potato chips if you don’t buy them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A second thing you can do is to engage with people around you to help you achieve your long-term goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Find a study partner and work with them on classwork.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Get an exercise buddy and let that person nag you to go to the gym.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Spend more time with people who have achieved the kind of success you hope for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Their goals and habits will start to affect the way you act.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-43665616879702225102015-03-09T08:59:00.001-07:002015-03-09T08:59:34.575-07:00What Kinds of People Start Businesses? <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">I live in Austin, Texas, which prides itself as a center for entrepreneurship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Entrepreneurs are people who start their own businesses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In Austin, we have many different kinds of new businesses ranging from high-tech companies that want to be the next Dell or Facebook to food-truck restaurants where someone just wants to follow their dream of cooking for others.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Starting your own business is difficult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You have to put in long hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You have to be prepared to fail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A high percentage of new ventures do not succeed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You have to be willing to change course if things are not working out as expected. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For decades, psychologists and business researchers have explored whether there is a collection of personality traits that is associated with starting a business.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A fascinating paper by Martin Obschonka, Eva Schmitt-Rodermund, Rainer Silbereisen, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Potter in the July, 2013 issue of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/105/1/104/">Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</a></i> explored two related questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>First, is it reasonable to characterize an entrepreneurial personality?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Second, are there clusters of people with that personality profile within a country?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Based on a lot of previous research, these authors suggested that there is a personality profile for entrepreneurs which is based on the Big Five personality dimensions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The Big Five dimensions, which reflect the largest differences in behavior across people are Openness to Experience (your willingness to consider new ideas), Extraversion (your desire to be the center of attention), Conscientiousness (your willingness to work hard and follow rules), Agreeableness (your desire to be liked by others), and Neuroticism (your lack of emotional stability).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They suggest that the ideal entrepreneurial profile is someone who is high in openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness and low in agreeableness and neuroticism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">(As an aside, you might wonder why a good entrepreneur is low in agreeableness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>While it is important to be liked by people who might want to do business with you, it is more important to be critical and demanding when starting a business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Highly agreeable people do not like to give other people bad news, and so they often temper their criticisms in ways that could hurt a business.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the first study in this paper, the researchers analyzed a data set in which over 600,000 people from all over the United States took a 44-question Big Five scale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The questionnaire also had information about where people lived.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The researchers measured how well each person in the sample compared to the ideal profile for an entrepreneur. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The first interesting result is that the personality profiles were not evenly distributed throughout the US.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There were more people fitting this profile in the western US than in the eastern US, though Georgia and Florida also had a high concentration of people with this profile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There are many possible reasons why this personality profile might cluster in particular regions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, people with an entrepreneurial personality profile might move to areas where they think they will meet like-minded folks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In regions with many people who have this profile, they may act in ways to heighten these behaviors in other people as well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The researchers then looked at the relationship between the entrepreneurial profile of people in a region and entrepreneurial activity in that region.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In these analyses, the researchers controlled for many other factors such as the ethnic makeup of those regions, the overall economic climate of the regions, and the age and gender profiles of the regions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In these analyses, regions with more people who had the entrepreneurial personality profile also had more startups and other entrepreneurial activity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To follow up on these studies, the researchers did the same analyses in Germany and the United Kingdom using large-scale data sets from those countries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The same pattern was observed in these studies. People with an entrepreneurial profile were found in clusters in each country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The regions that had the most people with that entrepreneurial profile also had the most entrepreneurial activity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This kind of large-scale analysis of the social structure of personality profiles is fascinating, and opens up a number of new avenues for research. Ultimately, it would be interesting to know what factors cause this entrepreneurial personality profile to become clustered in regions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-80048437744687298562015-03-02T06:32:00.002-08:002015-03-02T06:32:38.939-08:00People Who Lack Self-Control Value Others Who Have It <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">Willpower is a notoriously fickle thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some days, you can withstand even the fiercest temptation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>On other days, you can be distracted from your goals by almost anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There are clear differences between people as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some people maintain a single-minded focus on their goals, while others give in to the slightest enticement.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What can you do in those situations in which your willpower is going to let you down?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>At those times, it can be helpful to cling to the people around you who are good at resisting temptation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You can draw strength from other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">An article by Catherine Shea, Erin Davisson, and Grainne Fitzsimons in the June, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/6/1031.abstract">Psychological Science</a></i>suggests that people with low self-control naturally value the self-control in other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In one study, the researchers manipulated people’s self-control resources using an <a href="http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/16/6/351.short">ego depletion task</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some participants had to perform a moderately difficult self-control task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They watched a video and had to evaluate a character on the video.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>During the video, words flashed on the task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The ego-depletion group was told to ignore the words, while the control group watched the video with no instructions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This task is known to wear down people’s self-control abilities, which can cause self-control failures in later situations.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After watching the video, participants read a vignette about an office manager.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The story either suggested that the manager had a high, moderate, or low level of self-control. They were asked to rate how good a leader the manager was likely to be. Participants who had just done an ego depletion task and had a low level of self-control resources gave higher ratings when reading the story about the manager with a high level of self-control than when reading the story about the manager with a low level of self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ratings of the manager with a moderate level of self-control came out in between.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The participants who did the control task did not give significantly different ratings to the three managers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They were less influenced by differences in other people’s self-control.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A second study demonstrated a similar effect, but looked at individual differences in participants’ self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Differences in self-control were measured using the Stroop task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the Stroop task, people identify the color of the font of words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The words are names of colors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When the word names the same color as the font, people are faster to name the color than when the word names a different color from the font.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The difference between the speed of the consistent and inconsistent responses is a measure of self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People with a high level of self-control show less of a difference than those with a low level of self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The people with a low level of self-control (as measured by the Stroop task) gave a similar pattern of ratings as those in the ego-depletion condition of the previous study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Their ratings differed substantially based on the level of self-control of the manager.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The people with a high level of self-control did not differ much in their ratings of the manager.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A third study examined the relationship between the degree of self-control of the members of a romantic couple and their level of dependence on each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A partner with a low level of self-control relied much more on their significant other when that person had a high level of self control than when that person had a low level of self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A partner with a high level of self-control relied on their significant other equally strongly regardless of that person’s level of self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">These studies suggest that people naturally recognize the role that other people can play to enhance their self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When a person has a low-level of self control as a trait or when their willpower is tapped, they are much more prone to value the willpower of other people than when their self-control resources are high.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-622491943145555622015-02-24T08:09:00.002-08:002015-02-24T08:09:54.020-08:00Do Parks Make People Happier? <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">I have been lucky enough to live in Austin, Texas for the past 15 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One of the things that strikes people who visit here for the first time is how green it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For one thing, many people have the stereotype that all of Texas is desert and tumbleweeds, so when they see lots of trees, it does not fit their image.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>(There is plenty of desert in West Texas, so the stereotype is not completely without merit.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But, the city of Austin, itself is quite green.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There are lots of small parks, greenbelts, and hills with woods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the center of town, Ladybird Lake is ringed with a trail that is always full of walkers, runners, and bikers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If you live in a place with lots of parks like this, does it affect your life satisfaction?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This question was explored in a paper in the June, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/6/920.abstract">Psychological Science</a></i>by Mathew White, Ian Alcock, Benedict Wheeler, and Michael Depledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They did a longitudinal analysis of data in Great Britain collected over a period of 18 years.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The study involved over 10,000 people from urban areas and asked general health questions (including questions about their mental health) and questions about well-being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The data also permitted the researchers to determine how much green space was located in their neighborhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Green space included parks and gardens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The survey also had questions about other factors that affect well-being like education, marital status, age, and employment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The researchers entered these variables into a statistical analysis to determine the factors that predicted mental distress and overall ratings of well-being.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As you might expect, being married was associated with lower levels of mental distress and higher levels of well-being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Likewise, being employed (rather than unemployed) was associated with lower levels of mental distress and higher levels of well-being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These effects are rather large overall.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After taking all of these factors into account, living near parks did affect people’s mental health.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People experienced lower levels of mental distress and higher-levels of well-being when they lived near green space in their urban area.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On the one hand, these effects are reliable, but small.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The influence of living near parks was about one third the size of the influence of being married and about one tenth the size of the influence of being employed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As the authors point out, though, marriage and employment affect only individual families, while parks can influence whole neighborhoods, so the collective influence of parks on well-being can be enormous.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What does this mean?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Demographic trends suggest that people are moving back to cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Living in urban areas has many benefits such as low commuting costs and access to many interesting cultural activities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Living near parks, though, has a number of benefits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Parks allow people a chance to get away (even briefly) from the stress and noise of the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Parks also provide places for exercise and movement.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This research also suggests that governments should support the construction and maintenance of green areas in their cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Around the world, this is a time of austerity. Governments are cutting back on the services they provide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But, mental well-being translates into physical well-being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People who feel good about life take better care of themselves than those who do not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This work suggests that a relatively small investment in urban green spaces can save governments a lot of money down the line in health-care costs.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Finally, this work suggests that if you are moving to a city, you should look for a neighborhood that is near to parks and gardens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Being close to these green spaces will help you to engage in activities that will keep you healthier and happier.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-50081424623702814742015-02-09T07:42:00.001-08:002015-02-09T07:42:49.960-08:00Can You Make Teens Less Aggressive? <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">Over the past several years, I got to experience high school again through the eyes of my kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Though I have enjoyed going to band concerts and choir concerts and plays, I am glad that I am beyond my high school years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There is a lot of aggression in high school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Kids can be flat-out mean to each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some of it is just good-natured fun, as kids test out their ability to hurl verbal insults.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But, some of it is nasty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There are always a few kids who find themselves to be the object of a lot of teasing and bullying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those kids can suffer through their time in high school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They experience symptoms of depression.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They can also lash out at the people who torment them, acting aggressively toward them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Is there any way to break this cycle of aggression?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A fascinating paper by David Yeager, Kali Trzewniewski, and Carol Dweck in the May/June, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12003/abstract">Child Development</a></i> explored this question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I have written about Carol Dweck’s research in this blog before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>She and her colleagues argue that people tend to think about psychological traits in one of two ways. Sometimes they adopt an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">entity</i>mindset, in which they believe that the trait is a permanent fixture of someone’s psychology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Sometimes they adopt an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incremental </i>mindset, in which they believe that traits change over time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Most psychological traits can change, and so an incremental mindset is probably closer to the truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Yet, many children and adults adopt an entity mindset for all kinds of traits including intelligence, trustworthiness, and aggression.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To make kids less aggressive, you might think that the best strategy is to teach them skills for coping with disappointments and conflicts with other kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Perhaps they could use those skills to think differently about their behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If you have spent any time recently with teenagers, though, you know that they resist almost any attempt to tell them what to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, it may not be that effective to just give teens strategies to deal with conflicts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Instead, if you give them information about how personality traits like being aggressive can change over time, you may help them to deal more effectively with other people.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In their study, about 250 students from a city high school participated in this study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some students were in a control condition whose behavior was measured without any intervention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Other students participated in a 3-week program teaching them coping skills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They learned about things like hot to deal with social rejection and how to focus on positive aspects of their life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A third group participated in a 3-week program teaching them about the incremental mindset.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They learned that personality traits can change over time, because people’s brains are always changing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They also learned about the many factors that affect people’s behavior and how changes in motivations can change their behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Several weeks after the intervention, participants were given the chance to display aggressive and pro-social behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They played a computer game called “Cyberball.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this game, three players seated in different rooms play a game in which they pass a ball around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The other players are actually controlled by the computer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>After the first few passes, the two other players pass the ball only to each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This game has been shown to make people feel excluded.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After playing this game, participants did a taste testing activity in which they prepared food for one of the people they were supposed to have played Cyberball with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The participant was given information about the other person including the fact that the person does not like spicy food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The participant was given the chance to put hot sauce on the food, and they could put on as much hot sauce as they wanted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The idea is that the more hot sauce they put on, the more aggressive they are being toward this person who had just excluded them from a game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Before the food was “delivered” to the other person, the participant also had a chance to write a note to accompany the food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This note allowed participants to give either prosocial messages (“I didn’t add much hot sauce, because I know you don’t like it”) or antisocial messages (“I put a lot of hot sauce on, because you were mean to me.”)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Finally, a few months after the intervention, teachers were given the chance to identify students whose behavior had changed positively over the last few months of the year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These students were also less likely to be absent or tardy from school in the months after the intervention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Overall, participants given the incremental theory training put less hot sauce on the food after the game of Cyberball (so they were less aggressive toward others) than those who got the coping skills training or those in the control group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The participants given the incremental theory training also wrote more positive messages in their note than those in the other groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>At the follow-up later, the participants in the incremental theory group were also more likely to be identified by teachers as improving their behavior than those in the other groups.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">However, this training had a specific benefit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The students who were most likely to show improvements in their behavior were the ones who were often the victims of aggression, teasing, and bullying by other students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This training was particularly effective at helping victims of bullying to realize that the people around them can change, and so they did not need to lash out at these people.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This study adds to the benefits of thinking about psychological traits as being malleable rather than fixed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The more that you believe that your own behavior and other people’s behavior can change, the more willing you are to deal positively with interpersonal problems and to work harder to improve yourself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-32642704544535414902015-02-02T06:31:00.002-08:002015-02-02T06:31:50.806-08:00Both Good and Bad Habits are Boosted in Times of Stress <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">The effects of stress on willpower are a staple of romantic comedies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A character goes through a difficult romantic breakup, and in the next scene, she is sitting on the couch smeared in ice cream with empty wrappers strewn on the couch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">All of us have experienced this kind of failure of self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There is some bad habit we are trying to avoid, and we succeed until life gets hectic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Suddenly, it is business-as-usual. Because these breakdowns of willpower are so clear when they happen, you might think that stressful situations bring out your worst behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A fascinating paper in the June, 2013 issue of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/104/6/959/">Journal of Personality and Social</a> Psychology</i> by David Neal, Wendy Wood, and Aimee Drolet suggests a different possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They argue that in times of stress, we fall back on our habits generally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When those habits are bad, then we experience what we see as a failure of self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But, we also fall back on our good habits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We don’t notice those as readily, because those behaviors are helpful.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In a naturalistic study to support this view, the researchers explored the behavior of a sample of college students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>First, they looked at the strength of a number of habits relating to eating breakfast and reading the newspaper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some of these behaviors were good (like eating hot cereal for breakfast), while others were bad (eating a pastry for breakfast).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For each person, some behaviors were a strong part of their routine, while others were not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A particular individual might generally eat hot cereal, but rarely eat pastry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That person might also tend to read the Op-Ed section of the newspaper, but rarely read the comics.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Over the next four weeks, the researchers continued to track the students’ behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In two of those weeks, the students had an intense series of exams, while in the other two of those weeks, there were no major exams.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The researchers expected that the students would be undergoing more stress in the exam weeks, and so their willpower would be compromised.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When a particular behavior was a strong habit for that person, then they were more likely to engage in that behavior during the stressful exam weeks than during the less stressful non-exam weeks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This reliance on habits was evident both for the good behaviors and the bad ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, the lack of willpower drove people to rely on their habits, regardless of whether they were good or bad.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In several other studies, the researchers manipulated stress level for participants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In one study, the researchers tracked the behavior of participants over a series of days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>On a few of those days, participants were asked to perform their daily activities with their nondominant hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, if they routinely used their left hand while talking on the cell phone, they should now use their right hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This manipulation is known to cause stress to the willpower system by requiring a lot of effortful self-control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On the days when participants had to use their non-dominant hand, they were much more likely to perform both good and bad habits than they were on days when they were allowed to use their dominant hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Other studies in this paper demonstrated that people fall back on their habits, because they are acting without thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They are not explicitly choosing to act based on their habits when their willpower is depleted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This study adds to a growing literature demonstrating the power of habits in daily action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When the going gets tough, the natural response is to fall back on the behaviors that have carried you through so many other situations in the past.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">That is why it is crucial to work on developing good habits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It is hard to rise to the occasion in times of stress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When you have lots of exams, a big project at work, or are going through a stressful period in a relationship, you simply do not have the mental energy to rise to the occasion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Instead, you just want to get through the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In those cases, your habits will drive a lot of your behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The more that your habits push you toward behaviors that support your goals, the better you will do in stressful situations.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-45172503844457898052015-01-26T06:43:00.003-08:002015-01-26T06:43:14.355-08:00Distance Increases the Use of Statistics in Decisions <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">There is a real tension in decision making between using a broad sample of information and focusing on a compelling individual case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Recruiters will get a lot of information about job candidates before scheduling an interview, but then will give a lot of weight to the interview itself in making a final decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Politicians may have a lot of statistics to support a particular policy, but they are often driven to act by a specific event.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Presumably, a decision based on a lot of evidence is better than one that is based only on a specific case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>An interesting paper in the June, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://psp.sagepub.com/content/39/6/826.abstract">Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</a></i> by Erin Burgoon, Marlone Henderson, and Cheryl Wakslak examined how we evaluate other people’s decisions that are based either on statistics or specific cases.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">These researchers argued that the distance between you and the decision maker would influence your preference for the kind of decision that person has made.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Research on construal level theory by Yaacov Trope, Nira Liberman and their colleagues suggests that people think about situations more specifically when they are mentally close to that situation than when they are mentally far from it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Thinking about a decision specifically can lead to a preference for using information about a particular case over using general statistical information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, if you hear about a person who has made a decision using specific case information, you are probably happier with that decision if that person is close by than if they are far away.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One study in this paper was run two weeks after the shooting in Arizona that injured US Representative Gabrielle Giffords.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Participants read that their representative in Congress was supporting legislation to limit the size of the ammunition magazines in automatic weapons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They read an interview that supported this legislation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The interview focused either on statistics about gun violence or specifically on the shooting in Arizona.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some participants were told that the interview took place nearby in that representative’s local office, while others were told that the interview was given in far-away Washington, DC.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>After reading the interview, participants expressed their level of support for their member of Congress.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Participants who read that the interview was held nearby showed equal levels of support regardless of whether the legislation was being supported based on statistics or based on the specific shooting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those who read that the interview was held in Washington DC expressed a higher level of support for the Representative when the interview focused on statistics than when it focused on the specific case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This finding demonstrates that distance from the decision maker affects people’s beliefs about how that person should make a decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Another study in this series related this finding more specifically to construal level theory.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Research on construal level theory finds that you can induce a mindset to think about situations specifically or abstractly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, if you ask people to talk about how to accomplish a goal, they think more specifically afterward than if you ask them to talk about why they should accomplish that goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Talking about how to do something focuses people on more specific details than talking about why to do something, and that influence carries over to other tasks people are performing.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In one study, participants were first asked to give feedback to the superintendant of a local school district.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They picked an issue of their choice and talked either about how or why the superintendant should make a change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Then, they read that the superintendant was going to make a change to a school lunch program.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They were told that 85% of parents who were surveyed supported the change, but that one irate parent left a long voicemail message opposing the program.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>(Another group of participants read the opposite that 85% of parents opposed the program and one vocal parent supported it.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Some people read that the superintendant made a decision based on the consensus of the parents, while others read that the superintendant made a decision based on the argument made by the vocal parent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Then, people expressed their support for the superintendant.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Overall, participants felt that the superintendent made a better decision when the decision was based on the consensus of the parents than when it was based on a specific individual. However, if the participants had previously focused on “how” to accomplish a goal, they were more supportive when the superintendant decided based on the specific individual than if the participants had previously focused on “why” to accomplish a goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, a mindset that gets people to think specifically increases their appreciation for choices made based on specific information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">All things being equal, it is better to take a lot of data into account when making a choice than to focus on a particular representative case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>To help yourself appreciate decisions based on data, try to give yourself some mental distance from the choice being made.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That distance will help you to focus on a broader context in which a decision is being made.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-60840313397041686812015-01-20T07:21:00.002-08:002015-01-20T07:21:30.497-08:00Culture Affects Attention to Goals and Processes <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">When you want to guide your behavior, you have to pay attention to two different things—the goal and the process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The goal is the outcome you want to have happen, while the process is the set of steps that will allow you to achieve that goal. If you want to speak to a friend, you might adopt the goal to make a phone call.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As a part of the plan to do that, you need to engage in the process of dialing your friend’s number.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the United States, people tend to focus on the goal they want to accomplish when thinking about actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Is that a universal human tendency?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This question was explored in a paper in the June, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://psp.sagepub.com/content/39/6/707.abstract">Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin</a></i> by Yuri Miyamoto, Christopher Knoepfler, Keiko Ishii, and Li-Jun Ji.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They suggested that there are differences across cultures in how consistent people perceive themselves to be across situations, and that consistency might affect how people think about the actions they perform.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Self-consistency reflects the similarity in your actions across situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, you might feel that you are more outgoing when spending time with friends than when going to an event with family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If so, you are not being highly self-consistent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If you think you act similarly when spending time with different groups, then you are being highly self-consistent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These researchers point to work suggesting that Americans and Hong Kong Chinese see themselves as more self-consistent than Japanese do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The key question was whether this difference in self-consistency would be related to the way people view their actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People who are highly self-consistent may focus on the overall goal they want to achieve, because they want to maintain the same goals across situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People who are lower in self-consistency may focus on the actions they take, because those actions may differ across situations.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To test this possibility, participants in the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong were given two different questionnaires.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One measured people’s beliefs about the consistency of their behavior in different situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The second gave people a set of situations and asked them whether they see that situation as involving a goal or an action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, if you are greeting someone, do you think it is better to identify that action as showing friendliness or saying hello?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When you are taking a test are you showing your knowledge or answering questions? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The results were interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As expected based on the previous research, Americans and Hong Kong Chinese saw their actions as being more consistent across situations than the Japanese.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Americans and Hong Kong Chinese also tended to identify their actions with the goal rather than the action, while the Japanese tended to identify their actions with the action rather than the goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Statistical tests found that the degree to which people identified their actions with the goal was related to the degree to which they saw themselves as consistent across situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Why does this matter?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">First, cross-cultural research gives us a view of the variation in human behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If we do a study in the United States that explores the way people think and act, we often conclude that the results of this study reflect the way people think and act in general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These cross-cultural studies are important for helping us to tease apart the aspects of behavior that are universal parts of human nature from those that are a result of years of cultural training.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Second, the focus on goals and actions may affect behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When trying to change behavior, for example, people (at least in the United States) focus on the goal they want to achieve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, when going on a diet, people set a goal to lose 25 pounds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The problem with this focus on the goal is that when you achieve the goal, it is not clear what you should do next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That is one reason why people who succeed at losing weight often regain it later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If you focus instead on the process (what you eat, how you prepare your food), then you may end up losing weight, but you have generated a set of behaviors that you can maintain even after you reach your desired weight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, shifting your focus from goals to processes can be a benefit when trying to develop new habits.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-59448210158186222532015-01-12T07:26:00.001-08:002015-01-12T07:26:46.152-08:00Improving Concentration Improves Performance <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">There are times when it is just hard to get work done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You want to read a book, but you can’t stop thinking about a comment a friend made earlier in the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You need to get something written, but there is a little voice in the back of your head trying to get you to check your email.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Think of how productive you could be if you could just focus on what you are doing rather than having your mind wander all over.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">If you were trained to focus, would that actually make you more effective at thinking?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This question was explored in a paper in the May, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/5/776.abstract">Psychological Science</a></i>by Michael Mrazek, Michael Franklin, Dawa Phillips, Benjamin Baird, and Jonathan Schooler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These researchers explored the influence of mindfulness training on performance in a few thinking tasks.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Mindfulness training uses elements of meditation to help people become more aware of their thought patterns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>By doing exercises like concentrating on a taste or a smell, people learn to recognize the way that other thoughts can intrude on their current experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Along the way, this training helps people to learn to avoid actively suppressing thoughts, which can actually make people more likely to have the undesired thoughts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In this study, a sample of college students was randomly assigned either to a 2-week mindfulness training class or to a 2-week class on nutrition (which focused on healthy eating).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>All participants were given a pre-test and a post-test.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They did a test of reading comprehension taken from the GRE.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They also did a test of working memory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Working memory is the amount of information you can use in the moment to think.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The more that your mind wanders, the less working memory you have to focus on the task at hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>During the tests, participants were also asked questions about their mind wandering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>At various points during the test, they were stopped and were asked whether they were concentrating fully on the test or whether they were having other thoughts unrelated to what they were supposed to work on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The participants given the nutrition class showed no reliable difference in their performance on either test from the beginning to the end of the study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The number of mind-wandering thoughts did not change either.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The participants who were given the 2-week mindfulness training class improved on both the reading comprehension and working memory tests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Their mind-wandering also decreased.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Statistical tests demonstrated that the improvement in test scores was related to the decrease in mind-wandering.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This research suggests that when it comes to smart thinking, you may be your own worst enemy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The difficulties you have concentrating can have a huge impact on your ability to learn information and to solve new problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Your ability to focus is affected by many factors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Your busy information environment (with repeated interruptions from cell phones, instant messages, and email) can draw your attention from what you are trying to accomplish. In addition, your own mind-wandering affects your thinking.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Mindfulness training like the class used in this study is one ingredient in a program to make you smarter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This training helps you to learn more about your own thinking patterns, which ultimately helps you to sustain attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In addition, spend more time controlling your environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When you have hard work to do, shut off your email program and put your smart phone out of arm’s reach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Start removing the mental distractions from your environment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The less your mind wanders, the more effectively you will be able to think in the moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-6647967938997113842015-01-06T06:35:00.002-08:002015-01-06T06:35:37.330-08:00Does Early Academic Prowess Predict Later Success? <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">As you probably know, I am interested in smart thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I spend a lot of time writing about how to improve your thinking skills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I also argue that anyone can get smarter by learning more about the mind and how it works.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One of the things we value in the modern world is academic success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The people we think of as smart are often the ones who do well in school settings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>An open question is how early success in school settings affects success in later life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Early in the history of the study of intelligence testing, Lewis Terman followed the careers of a number who scored at the genius level on the IQ tests that he helped to develop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Many of these high-IQ individuals were quite successful in their careers, though others were not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And there were also very successful individuals who did not score highly on the IQ tests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As interesting as the Terman Genius study is, there are few studies that have looked at people who score well on tests of achievement and aptitude early in life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, it is hard to get a clear sense of how early academic success predicts later performance in life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A fascinating paper in the May, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/5/648.abstract">Psychological Science</a></i>by Harrison Kell, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow does just that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They tracked a group of people who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) at the age of 13.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The SAT (as it was given back then) had two scores—a verbal score and a math score. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The people they tracked were those who got a score that placed them in the top 0.01% (that is 1 in 10,000) on either the verbal or math portion of the test (or both).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, these individuals were not just high-scorers for their age group, but extremely high-scorers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Twenty years after taking the SAT, this sample of 320 people was surveyed about their achievements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In addition, the researchers used databases to get additional information about employment, publications, patents, and awards.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Several interesting things emerged from this analysis.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The people who did extremely well on the verbal section of the SAT tended to go into careers in the arts, the humanities and the social sciences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those who did well on the math portion of the test tended to go into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Many of those who became lawyers did very well on the verbal section of the SAT, and moderately well on the mathematics section of the test at age 13.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This group was highly accomplished in their fields.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The group that did well in mathematics generated large numbers of patents and large numbers of publications in journals in the STEM disciplines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those that did well on the verbal section of the test went on to publish books, plays, short stories, and publications in the humanities at a high rate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These individuals also received a number of grants and awards to support their work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Finally, many of these individuals went on to get tenure prestigious research universities.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There is no comparison group in this study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The researchers just tracked the accomplishments of this group. However, the rates of publication and achievement of tenure are higher in this group than in the general population, so this group of individuals was clearly operating at a high level.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What kinds of conclusions should we draw from data like this?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On the one hand, kids who show high levels of academic achievement early in their careers are on a path toward greatness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If we nurture those students, they have the study skills and interest in learning that will allow them to work at the highest levels of the fields they choose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It is well-worth finding ways to help these students to continue their studies and to make their contribution to the world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On the other hand, that does not mean that we should focus selectively on high achievers at the expense of everyone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Smart thinking is ultimately a skill that anyone can acquire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Anyone who is motivated to learn can ultimately do great things in a field of study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Early success may be a marker of great things to come in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But, a person who is not in the top 0.01% at the age of 13 is not destined for mediocrity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One danger in labeling certain kids as “gifted” early on in their lives is that the kids who do not get that label can believe that they do not possess the talents required for greatness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>With effort and guidance, there is greatness in all of us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And for a fascinating discussion of this issue, check out Scott Barry Kaufman’s new book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ungifted-Intelligence-Scott-Barry-Kaufman/dp/0465025544/">Ungifted</a></i>.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-12842596288322391962014-12-10T06:09:00.002-08:002014-12-10T06:09:07.212-08:00Do Sunny Days Make You Feel Good About Life? <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">I have a soft spot in my heart for the song “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sunny Side of the Street</i>,” and that song has helped me get through some tough times in my life. The lyric “Life can be so sweet/On the sunny side of the street” captures our general belief that rainy days are sad, while sunny days are happy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Clearly, this belief is embedded in our culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Not only do we get songs like “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sunny Side of the Street</i>,” but we also have classics like “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rainy Days and Mondays (Always Get Me Down).</i>”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There are a few studies out there that also examine the relationship between weather and measures of well-being (including mood and overall life satisfaction).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>An interesting paper in the May, 2013 issue of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/104/5/872/">Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</a> </i>by Richard Lucas and Nicole Lawless points out that there is a lot of inconsistency in the results of studies that have looked at the relationship between mood and well-being.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">These researchers analyzed data from over 1 million people who rated their overall life satisfaction on a 4-point scale as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System that is run by the US Centers for Disease Control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This survey included information about where the survey was filled out, and so the responses could be compared against a variety of weather variables for that location.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The researchers examined the relationship between the rating of life satisfaction and temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, barometric pressure, wind speed, and humidity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The researchers also explored a variety of different aspects of these variables.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, with cloud cover, they not only look at the cloud cover that day, but also how that cloud cover deviated from the norm at that time of year as well as the difference between the cloud cover on the day of the survey from the previous day’s cloudiness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Similar analyses were done for all of the weather variables variables.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The researchers also looked for gender differences.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">These analyses allowed the researchers to explore questions like whether people are happier when the weather is much sunnier than normal for that time of year, and whether a sunny day that follows a cloudy day makes people happier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What do you think they found?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Take a second and make your predictions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Which of these aspects of the weather had the biggest effect on people’s judgments of their life satisfaction?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The answer is…none of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The fascinating thing about these careful analyses is that no aspects of the weather had any appreciable impact on judgments of life satisfaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>There were a couple of statistically reliable results reported in the study, but they reflected differences of about 0.02 on the measure of life satisfaction.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">So, if the weather does not affect our daily judgments of life satisfaction, why do we think that the weather matters?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">There are several factors at work here.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">First, looking at the data, there are some broad relationships between life satisfaction and the weather.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Overall, people who live in warmer climates are more satisfied with life than people who live in colder climates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People who live in sunnier climates are more satisfied with life than those who live in cloudier climates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>So, the overall weather in a region does seem to be related to life satisfaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Of course, there are many possible reasons for that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It is easier to exercise when it is warm and sunny than when it is cold and rainy, so perhaps people who live in warm climates get more physical activity than those who live in cold climates.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Second, we often assume that specific factors will have a greater influence on our overall well-being than they actually do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Dan Gilbert, Tim Wilson and their colleagues have explored how they would be affected by positive or negative life <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&amp;id=1998-12057-003">events</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>People assumed that their life satisfaction would be changed for a long period of time by events like getting into a romantic relationship or being denied tenure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In fact, although those factors did have a short-term influence on people’s well-being, they did not have a long-term influence on judgments of life satisfaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That is our overall level of life satisfaction is governed by many factors, and it is hard to predict how any factor will affect us.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Ultimately, we have to realize that the best predictor of how satisfied we are going to be with our lives tomorrow, six months from now, or next year is how satisfied we are with our lives today.</div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8231333583143357218.post-62577313036309350312014-12-04T07:27:00.002-08:002014-12-04T07:27:50.029-08:00Your Ethical Mindset <style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-unhide:no; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">People’s ethical behavior is complicated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On the one hand, we have situations in which we are strongly consistent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>For example, many vegans I know will not eat any animal products, they will avoid buying products with leather or animal ingredients, and they give time and money to causes to protect animals. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On the other hand, there are times when our ethical actions may balance each other out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I know people who give money to environmental causes, but then buy gas-guzzling cars that they know are harming the environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They recognize the contradiction in behavior, but accept the contradiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">An interesting paper by Gert Cornelissen, Michael Bashshur, Julian Rode, and Marc Le Menestrel in the April, 2013 issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/4/482.abstract">Psychological Science</a></i>explores the roots of these behaviors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As these researchers point out, there are two dominant modes of ethical reasoning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Consequentialist </i>reasoning focuses on outcomes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When reasoning consequentially, you focus on whether the end result of an action is one that is acceptable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deontological</i> reasoning focuses on principles or rules.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>When reasoning deontologically, the key issue is whether a particular ethical principle was enforced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Consider the “<a href="http://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/foot.pdf">trolley dilemma</a>,” which has been used in many studies of ethical reasoning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this dilemma, a runaway trolley on a track is on a collision course that will kill five people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>You are standing next to a lever that would divert the trolley to another track that would cause only one person to be killed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Do you pull the lever?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Consequential reasoning suggests that one dead person is better than five dead people, and so you should pull the lever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Deontological reasoning suggests that killing anyone with an action is a bad thing, and so it is better to let the trolley run its course than to commit an action that would cause someone to die.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The researchers suggest that if you reason about outcomes, then you may be likely to balance outcomes across decisions, but if you reason about moral rules, then you may be likely to maintain consistency across your behavior.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In one study in this paper, participants were induced to think either consequentially or ontologically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>One group was asked to remember an ethical situation in their past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The consequential group focused on doing something because it benefitted or hurt other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The other group was asked to remember an ethical situation in which they followed or failed to follow a principle or norm.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Within each of these groups, some people were asked to focus on a case in which they did something ethical (they helped people or followed a principle).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Others were asked to focus on a case in which they did something unethical (they hurt people or failed to follow a principle).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After recalling a situation, participants played the “dictator game.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The dictator game emerged from research on behavioral economics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this task, two participants are introduced to each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Then, one participant is given money (in this case ten coins).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They are told that they can give as many coins as they want to their partner, and that they get to keep the rest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The more coins they give to their partner, the more fairly they are acting toward someone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In this study, participants met their partner, then went into separate rooms where the dictator game was described.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Each participant was told that they were playing the role of the dictator, so data was actually collected from every participant.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When participants were asked to think about ethical situations that were focused on outcomes, they balanced their outcomes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The people who thought about a situation in which they helped someone gave fewer coins to their partner than the ones who thought about a situation in which they hurt someone else.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When participants thought about ethical situations that were focused on principles, they maintained consistency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those who thought about following a principle gave more coins to their partner than those who thought about a situation in which they failed to follow a principle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Another study in this series obtained a similar finding, except that participants were given the opportunity to cheat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those who thought about consequences were more likely to cheat if they thought about an ethical action they took in the past than if they thought about an unethical action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Those who thought about principles were more likely to cheat if they thought about an unethical action than if they thought about an ethical one.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">You can use these mindsets to help you in ethical situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If you find yourself in a dilemma where you are tempted to do something unethical, focus on situations in your past in which you stood up for a principle that was important to you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This focus will help you to do the ethical thing in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div>Art Markmanhttps://plus.google.com/113015718416261368227noreply@blogger.com0